Guillaume Verdon
speaker
342 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2023
last heard Dec 2023
Guillaume Verdon’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And the world is jiggling about, there's cosmic radiation from outer space that usually flips your quantum bits, and there what you do is you encode information non-locally through a process called quantum error correction.
And by encoding information non-locally, any local fault, hitting some of your quantum bits with a hammer, proverbial hammer, if your information is sufficiently delocalized, it is protected from that local fault. And to me, I think that humans fluctuate, right? They can get corrupted, they can get bought out.
And if you have a top-down hierarchy where very few people control many nodes of many systems in our civilization, that is not a fault tolerance system. You corrupt a few nodes and suddenly you've corrupted the whole system. Just like we saw at OpenAI, it was a couple board members and they had enough power to potentially collapse the organization.
And at least to me, you know, I think making sure that power for this AI revolution doesn't concentrate in the hands of the few is one of our top priorities so that we can maintain progress in AI and we can maintain a nice, stable economy. adversarial equilibrium of powers, right?
I think we get painted as reckless, trying to go as fast as possible. I mean, the reality is that whoever deploys an AI system is liable for or should be liable for what it does. And so if the organization or person deploying an AI system does something terrible, they're liable.
And ultimately, the thesis is that the market will induce sort of, will positively select for AIs that are more reliable, more safe, and more tend to be aligned. They do what you want them to do, right? Because customers, right, if they're liable for the product they put out that uses this AI, they won't want to buy AI products that are unreliable.
So we're actually, for reliability engineering, we just think that the market is much more efficient at achieving this sort of reliability optimum than sort of heavy-handed regulations that are written by the incumbents and in a subversive fashion, serves them to achieve regulatory capture.
I would say that assigning, just arbitrarily saying 30% seems very arbitrary. I think organizations would allocate whatever budget is needed to achieve the sort of reliability they need to achieve to... perform in the market. And I think third-party auditing firms would naturally pop up because how would customers know that your product is certified, reliable, right?
They need to see some benchmarks and those need to be done by a third party. The thing I would oppose and the thing I'm seeing that's really worrisome is there's a sort of weird sort of correlated interest between the incumbents, the big players, and the government.
And if the two get too close, we open the door for some sort of government-backed AI cartel that could have absolute power over the people. If they have the monopoly together on AI and nobody else has access to AI... then there's a huge power gradient there. And even if you like our current leaders, right? I think that, you know, some of the leaders in big tech today are good people.
You set up that centralized power structure. It becomes a target, right? Just like we saw at OpenAI, it becomes a market leader, has a lot of the power, and now it becomes a target for those that want to co-opt it. And so I just want separation of AI and state.
Some might argue in the opposite direction, like, hey, we need to close down AI, keep it behind closed doors because of geopolitical competition with our our adversaries. I think that the strength of America is its variance, is its adaptability, its dynamism, and we need to maintain that at all costs. It's our free market.
Capitalism converges on technologies of high utility much faster than centralized control. And if we let go of that, we let go of our main advantage over capitalism.
I don't know if I believe in fast takeoff. I don't think there's a hyperbolic singularity, right? A hyperbolic singularity would be achieved on a finite time horizon. I think it's just one big exponential. And the reason we have an exponential is that we have... More people, more resources, more intelligence being applied to advancing this science and the research and development.
And the more successful it is, the more value it's adding to society, the more resources we put in. And that's sort of similar to Moore's Law as a compounding. exponential. I think the priority to me is to maintain a near equilibrium of capabilities.
We've been fighting for open source AI to be more prevalent and championed by many organizations because there you sort of equilibrate the alpha relative to the market of AIs, right? So if The leading companies have a certain level of capabilities and open source and truly open AI trails not too far behind.
I think you avoid such a scenario where a market leader has so much market power, it just dominates everything and runs away. And so to us, that's the path forward, is to make sure that every hacker out there, every grad student, every...
kid in their mom's basement has access to, uh, you know, AI systems can understand how to, uh, uh, work with them and can contribute to the search over the hyper parameter space of how to engineer the systems, right? If you, if you think of, you know, our collective research as, as, as a civilization, it's really a search algorithm. And the more, uh,
points we have in the search algorithm, in this point cloud, the more we'll be able to explore new modes of thinking, right?
That's what we're trying to avoid. To me, I think another point of failure is the centralization of the supply chains for the hardware. We have NVIDIA is just the dominant player. AMD is trailing behind. And then we have TSMC as the main fab in Taiwan, which geopolitically... sensitive. And then we have ASML, which is the maker of the lithography, extreme ultraviolet lithography machines.
Showing 61–80 of 342 · page 4 of 18
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